South Dakota: Minuteman Historic Site

🚀 Minuteman: The Missiles Next Door

We pulled off the interstate somewhere west of Badlands National Park, in that vast, flat, wind-scoured corner of South Dakota where the sky seems about twice the size it has any right to be, and found ourselves standing in front of what looked, for all the world, like a fairly ordinary bit of American countryside. A few scrubby fields, some rusting farm equipment in the distance, a dirt track heading off towards nowhere in particular.

Except it wasn’t ordinary at all. Beneath our feet, and under fields just like this one stretching across the western third of South Dakota, the United States government had buried enough nuclear firepower to end human civilisation several times over. And had kept it there, armed and ready to go, for thirty years.

Welcome to Minuteman Missile National Historic Site. One of the more sobering afternoons we’ve spent anywhere.

The history here begins in earnest in 1963, which, if you need reminding, was right in the middle of the Cold War — that delightful forty-year period when the Americans and the Soviets spent their time glaring at each other across the Iron Curtain and building ever more imaginative ways to obliterate each other. The Cuban Missile Crisis had only just wrapped up the previous year, leaving the world’s knees still slightly wobbly, and both superpowers were busy working out how to make sure the other side would never, ever consider pressing the button first.

The American answer, out here on the Great Plains, was the Minuteman II Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. The Air Force quietly went about constructing fifteen Launch Control Facilities across western South Dakota, each one commanding and controlling ten Launch Facilities — or Missile Silos, if you prefer plain English — buried in the ground across the surrounding landscape. That’s 150 missile silos in total, each one containing a Minuteman II missile topped with a nuclear warhead, all of it spread across an area of the map that most Americans couldn’t point to without a compass and a good deal of luck.

For thirty years — from 1963 through to the early 1990s when the Cold War finally ran out of steam — this missile field operated continuously. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. No bank holidays. No time off for Christmas. No calling in sick. The missiles sat in their silos, ready to launch on receipt of the appropriate order, through the baking heat of South Dakota summers, which can be quite brutal, and through winters so savage that the wind comes off the plains like something personal and vindictive.

Think about that for a moment, if you will. Out here in what most people would generously describe as the middle of nowhere — small towns, cattle ranches, farms growing wheat and corn and soybeans — ordinary American families were going about their ordinary American lives with nuclear weapons literally buried in the fields next door. Farmers planted their crops around the chain-link fences of the missile silos. Children caught the school bus a mile from a facility capable of reaching Moscow in under thirty minutes. It’s the sort of thing that sounds completely made up until you’re actually standing here looking at it.

The Air Force personnel who staffed these installations — young men and women, many of them in their twenties — lived and worked in a world of extraordinary psychological pressure. The Launch Control Facilities each housed a crew of two missile combat crew members, working shifts in an underground capsule about the size of a decent-sized living room, buried under several feet of reinforced concrete, connected to the outside world primarily by radio and a very sturdy blast door. Their job was simple enough to state and utterly extraordinary to contemplate: wait for the order. If it came, verify it, and launch.

It never came, of course. That’s rather the point. The entire colossal enterprise — the missiles, the silos, the crews, the billions of dollars, the thirty years of round-the-clock vigilance — was designed not to be used. The strategy was called Mutually Assured Destruction, which at least had the honesty to produce the acronym MAD, and the idea was straightforward enough: if you know that launching a nuclear attack will result in your own annihilation within the hour, you probably won’t launch a nuclear attack. It worked, in the grim, paradoxical way that such things work. The missiles that threatened to destroy everything helped ensure that nothing was destroyed.

The National Park Service now preserves two of the original facilities here — Delta-01, a Launch Control Facility, and Delta-09, one of the actual missile silos — and has done a remarkable job of presenting this history without either sanitising it into a feel-good patriotic romp or turning it into a hand-wringing exercise in guilt. It’s just the history, laid out clearly and honestly, and it’s genuinely quite extraordinary.